21st Century Guidebook to Fungi

Mycology is a curious discipline; a peculiar division has arisen in what the word means. Meaning seems to depend on who you are. Around the world, biochemists, molecular biologists and even clinical scientists study fungi in great detail, but don't call themselves mycologists. They call themselves biochemists, molecular biologists or clinicians! Yet they study only fragments of the organism. If the molecular biology (or biochemistry, or pathology) is to be properly understood and exploited then at some stage those fragments have to be assembled into an overall, whole organism, view. At which point we are in danger of needing one of those ‘field mycologists’ that are so undervalued that: ‘In many parts of the world mycologists are an endangered species’ (Minter, 2001) and consideration needs to be given to ‘promoting the conservation of taxonomists themselves’ (Courtecuisse, 2001).

In this textbook we have attempted to provide the overall view of each topic from the start; we like to think of this as the real fungal biology. Now, in this chapter, it is time to be divisive. Throughout this book we have attempted to provide molecular details and molecular interpretations of as many as possible of the situations we have described. Knowing what we know by this stage about the overall biology of fungi we can afford to examine some of the fragments in much more detail and ask how they can be manipulated to our advantage.